The latest from my women's studies class...

For the past week, we've been reading a book called The Package Deal by Nicholas Townsend, which focuses on the demanding expectations put on fathers in our society. In all of our talk about how women are confined by domesticity and feminitiy, I think it's easy to forget that male counterparts are facing significant pressures by our culture to perform in a certain way as well. That being said, something in my last reading assignment made my ears perk up and think of how women's work is being appreciated and defined.

First of all, the book discusses how fathers are generally expected to act as providers for the family - this means working long hours in a job or career in order to earn money for their wives and children. One part even quoted a man saying "I think that most of us turned out the way we did - strong work ethic and real feeling of responsibitlity for ourselves - because of him" (118). I realize that work in the public sphere has long been recognized as more valuable than work done in the private sphere, but is a woman's work in the home going completely unaccounted for? I know that my father worked 8-5 hours while I was growing up, while my mom stayed at home. Does this mean that he was working significantly harder than my mom, who let's face it spent up to 15 hours a day doing childcare and household work? It just doesn't sit right with me that we have become so fixated on the hours someone spends away from home and measure that on a scale of work ethic.

This thought made me think of the last book we read which focused on transnational families located in the Philippines. In these families, one parent or the other was often working across the world in order to provide financial support for their spouse and children. Interestingly, the men were seen as loving fathers merely because their absence showed their dedication to making money. Mothers, meanwhile, had to give much more to their children than the financial support to be considered good mothers. Where does this double-standard come into play? Do children actually view the work their parents do differently based on the gendered expectations that society has placed on them? I just really wonder what differences in child-rearing practices would change the perceptions children have of their parents' financial support.

The positive outcomes of working mothers

A couple days ago I talked about the different experiences my friend and I have had growing up in working/non-working mother households, but I wanted to talk about some of the academic research that relates to the trends I've seen.

Lois Hoffman's book Working Mothers gathers and discusses some of the research that has been done on how maternal employment can effect other aspects of children's development other than just the cognitive. Much of their information came from studies done in the 60s and 70s, so it's interesting to see how these perceived advantages/disadvantages of maternal employment have manifested themselves in the current working generation. Here are some of the main conclusions in Hoffman's chapter on the effects on children:

• Children of women who work were much more likely to approve of maternal employment, specifically girls reported their desire to enter the workforce when they got old enough. This seems appropriate considering the rising number of women in the workforcee over the past 50 years (rock on).
• A blending of traditional gender stereotypes. "Daughters of working mothers saw women as competent and effective, while sons of working mothers saw men as warm and expressive" (131). It's cool to hear that exposing children to something outside of the traditional male breadwinner/female home-maker environment might actually change the way they think about these expectations.
• Some of this information was wishy-washy, but I think worth noting. There may have been some correlation between daughters of working mothers and higher levels of self-confidence and independence. I think this is a really hard factor to account for, which is why the book doesn't make it an absolute conclusion, but there is definitely evidence for the argument. Along these same lines, "evidence suggests that daughters of working mothers have higher acheivement aspirations" (136).
• She found that children who are expected to help with household tasks (this focuses mainly on children of working mothers) exhibited positive consequences.

I'm not trying to say that all of these are absolutely true, but I think there is something to be said of what image mothers put forth for their children. I won't say that I grew up with low-self confidence and minimal aspirations, but I do think I was presented with an environment that required less responsibility. However, I think a lot of how we react once we're actually ready for the work/stay-at-home decision comes from far after the initial child-rearinig period that many of these studies focus on. I know that until I came to college I honestly believed I would finish school, work for a while, but give up my job when it came time to stay home with my children. I'm not arguing that this isn't okay, but I definitely think we are nurtured for so many years beyond our initial childhood. At least for me, being able to receive the education I'm getting has pushed my thoughts on this matter far past what these studies say about children of non-working mothers.

Ideal-Worker

In Joan Williams' book Unbending Gender, she discusses the notion of what is an ideal-worker in our economy. In general, the people who are able to perform as ideal workers are men, because they have the advantage of assumed caregivers at home. While their wives are expected to routinely deal with care for children, men are able to work longer hours with less work-family conflict and earn the higher wages. In the meantime, women are faced with so-called "mommy tracks" which leave little room for advancement in their careers. The ideal-worker image also dictates a 5 day work week with increasingly long hours - something that can be conflicting and difficult for a working mother.

Williams offers her solution in the restructuring of market work, involving shortening the work week, flexible hours and job sharing. Wouldn't everyone be better off if they worked only 4 day work weeks? In a time when we have all become so crunched for time, it would be nice to take that extra day off to relax. Not only would the extra time be useful for personal reasons, but it would allow for families to spend more time with their children and figure out easier childcare options. Along with this, letting workers cooperate to work out flexible hours and job sharing would make advancement in careers a task that's more agreeable with raising children. What should be important is the quality of the prodouct produced by a worker rather than the actual time spent doing the work. In order to accomodate for families yet allow growth in careers, job sharing and flexible schedules enable women to continue to do the work they're successful with and yet spend the time with their children.

Even though it sounds like some sort of idealistic world, it also seems something that would work tremendously well if it was accepted by everyone. Oh I forgot to mention, restructuring the work place doesn't only have positive outcomes for women, but men are also benefiting and potentially escaping some of the standards placed upon them as workers. If these things occured, I think it would make the decision for mothers to work or not much less daunting.

Experiences

I wanted to explain a little bit about why this subject matters to me and how my experiences have sparked an interest in women's choice to work.

When I was growing up, my mother stayed home full-time taking care of my brothers and I, while also keeping up the household tasks. My whole life she has been a stay-at-home mom and I've never known her to have a job or career of her own. Parts of this have been very, very nice - I have been very close to my mom my whole life, I've always had someone to take care of my everyday needs, and things seemed pretty easy. Although many aspects of having my mother at home were wonderful, I wonder how much I gained and how much I missed out on simultaneously. Is there any way that I was raised in a more nurturing environment that is conducive to learning, merely because my mother was at home with me all day? The research I've done clearly shows that in the long-run my cognitive development hasn't been any different from that of my peers who had working mothers. So if I didn't gain any advantage in my early development, what else was I missing out on?

One of my close friends grew up in a family where her mother and father worked full-time. Even from the point that she was born her mother chose to cut her maternity leave short in order to return to work. After getting to know more about her situation growing up, I started to wonder how having her mother at work changed the way she grew up. First of all, she talks a lot about having to assume responsibility from an early age. I'd like to think that I learned how to be responsible, but when comparing to my friend I've realized that I spent a lot of time being taken care of rather than learning how to take care of myself. She also talks about having her dad cook and share in many of the household tasks - something my father never did. I think by seeing these actions, she has been able to see how an egalitarian household can successfully work. Even though I completely agree with equal gender roles, I never had that model to follow after. Things were obviously very different for her but she and I ended up at the same place here at St. Olaf.

I don't know that these experiences can be indicative of how growing up in working and non-working mother households has an effect on children, but they seem to show some main differences in our mindsets. It'd be really interesting to see how these things differ across experiences.

Equality in the Workplace

I stumbled across an article in the Star Tribune today that summarized some of the census results having to do with me and women's equality in the workplace. According to the article, nearly as many women have advanced degrees as men, there are more women in the work force as men, and yet women are making 80.2% of what men earn. The piece highlights working mothers, by pointing out the increased needs for child-care and fixing the pay disparities.

But this is the part that makes me tilt my head in curiousity: acknowledging that women make up the majority of the work force the article still goes on to say that "as more women enter the workplace, I think they will realize the unfairness of the situation.. and demand change." Wait a minute, didn't we already establish that more women already are in the work force? How many women need to join the work force before the realization of inequality becomes a driving need for change? Apparently more than the millions who make up greater than 50% of the current work force.

I also have to wonder if the article is implying that it's women themselves who are entirely responsible for realizing and fixing the pay disparities in the work place. Not to mention the other acts of discrimination that women face because of their roles and women and mothers in our society. This makes me think of something we discussed in class today... the idea of whether change comes through changes in our roles or through the larger symbols presented in our society. This question completely applies in this case, where we see the roles have changed to the point where women are acquiring higher education and participating in the work force, yet the symbols and titles attributed to them have changed less than we could expect.

We also talked in class the other day about how women my age can make changes in working situations for women by challenging some of the standards that apply to working mothers, even though they don't apply to us - not yet. I know that I haven't spent the last three years working my butt off just as hard as my male peers to work in a situation where they will be paid that extra 20%.

Still a lot of change to be made, but in the big picture, yay for those women who are making their lives with work and family succeed. We just need to make sure the support is there to help the trend continue.

Who's going to care for the children?

Childcare inevitably plays a huge role in women's decisions about working after they have children. How could it not? You have a baby and when you go back to work you want to make sure that child is being taken care of as well as it would if you were at home. But has our society placed too high of a standard on women's responsibility of taking are of children? Joan Williams in her book Unbending Gender talks about commodification anxiety as a guilt women feel about women leaving their children in a childcare center as it is viewed in a economical market perspective. People don't want to feel like they are paying someone to take care of their child in the same way they would pay for any other consumer item, which makes mothers in particular feel guilty about leaving their children in daycare while they're at work.

How much does this anxiety really exist? Although childcare necessarily remains an important aspect of the work/stay-at-home decision, are women actually keeping themselves out of the workforce in response to this dilemma? If so, is it the childcare system we need to reform or the way we view our standards of maternal caregiving? I think it's a little bit of both, but am not sure how mothers view the matter.

Does Maternal Employment Effect Cognitive Development?

During the 1950s and 60s, when the number of women joining the workforce began to rise, there were claims by psychoanalyst, writers, and doctors that claimed these women were negatively effecting their child's development. Even as late as 2004 Suzanne Venker published a book illustrating the 7 reasons why having children and actively pursuing your career just don't mix. As I began to think about this assumption, I started to wonder what merit it actually held. Is there any negative effect to working while trying to raise a child? I did some research through academic resources and this is what I found...

A lot of the studies I looked at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) which gathered information from children born in 1986 and their mothers. While some studies examined the data for a specific time period, others chose to follow a specific group of children throughout their developing years, sometimes up to adolescence and college years. Each study also varied in the factors they took into consideration, such as maternal income, child care options, the amount of quality parental time spent with the child, and education levels of both parents. They used these standards to test the PPVT (Peabody Picture and Vocabulary Test, a standard developmental testing system) of children whose mothers worked.

And now the results. Nearly all of the studies I read found a notable negative cognitive development during the first year of life for those children whose mothers worked. However, if the mother continued to work through the subsequent years of the child's life, the negative effects are offset by positive development through years 2-4. In the end, these children have no net effect on their cognitive ability merely because their mothers were working as they aged. Besides this neutral long-term effect on cognitive development, many studies cited positive social outcomes for children whose mothers worked during their childhood (I'll discuss some of these things in a later post).

Having shared the information that I've learned, I'm curious to know how these claims of negative effects on children remain a fear of working women today. Have these things crossed your mind when deciding whether to continue work after childbirth? I am just really interested in knowing to what extent any of these ideas remain today, and if so how mothers react to them.

If anyone has comments I'd love to hear them! That's all I've got for today but I'll write again tomorrow about some more things on my mind...

Why I'm Here

First of all, I'd like to say that the whole blogging world is completely new to me, so this will be an experience in itself! I'm writing for my Women's Studies semester-long project, but also as a way to bridge the gap between the things I'm learning about in class and what's actually going on in the lives of women. As a student at St. Olaf College, I've spent a lot of time learning very useful information, but how does that apply to real people?

Since the class has revolved around the topic of women and work, I decided to focus my research on maternal employment and cognitive development of children. So after all of the academic research I've done, I want to know what women are really feeling when it comes to leaving their children in daycare to pursue their careers. I'm planning on keeping this blog for a month to send out the information I've learned in class and hopefully get comments and opinions of women in particular, but really anyone who can relate to the subject.

What are some of the issues that moms are facing with regards to work and childcare? How does this align with the research I've done? How can academic research be useful for moms? These are all questions that I'm hoping to answer in the process of my month-long blog. I hope that this project can serve to quench my curiousity and provide a source of information and debate for all of you!